Tetris Message Board

I've gotten flak in the past for being overly glib with my use of the word "shred," but I'd say there's enough finger-tapping and cello-sawing going on in this video to qualify.Read more...

Reddit user IAmAHiggsBoson stumbled onto a little easter egg on his oscilloscope: apparently if you press the right series of buttons, you can play Tetris instead of measuring voltages, or doing some other kind of boring "actual work".Read more...

Drexel University professor Frank Lee took over the side of the 29-story Cira Centre in Philadelphia last year to play a gigantic game of Pong , setting the Guinness World Record for the “Largest Architectural Video Game Display.” Last night he doubled the record with a massive game of Tetris. Read more...

Artist Michael Johansson has a series of pieces he calls Tetris. At first glance they look to be just orderly piles of stuff, but look closer. Read more...

The Sochi Winter Games closing ceremony was pretty boring . This Tetris-themed and inspirational moment from today's Paralympic Winter Games closing ceremony blows anything we saw three weeks ago out of the water. Read more...

Lots of people have business cards, but most cards are unfortunately kind of forgettable. Not this business card, though—this one is more likely to be a time sink, thanks to the playable Tetris it features.Read more...

New puzzle game Puyo Puyo Tetris doesn't only turn Tetris blocks into anime characters. It also turns them into gummies.Read more...

The tens of thousands of Twitch members who are participating in a crowd-sourced playthrough of Pokemon Red are also unknowingly taking part in an ongoing game of Tetris. Twitch Plays Pokemon Plays Tetris captures input requests from the Twitch Plays Pokemon chat and repurposes them for the strangest, lowest-scoring game of Tetris you've likely seen.

Curated by Xkeeper, Twitch Plays Pokemon Plays Tetris features a modified version of Nintendo's 8-bit Tetris that gives players greater control over tetrimino placement...in theory. The mod adds a feature that sends falling pieces toward the top of the screen every time an "up" input is registered, adding to the chaos.

It's a very deliberately paced game of Tetris, in other words. Scores are low and completed lines are rare, but possible. Other Twitch Plays Pokemon-inspired bits of madness that have cropped up over the last week include Twitch Plays QWOP and RNG Plays Pokemon, which uses a random number generator to decide input.

[Image: Nintendo/Twitch]

Right now, more than 100,000 people are trying their best to control a single trainer over at 'Twitch Plays Pokemon.' They know that if they send in a command via the 'Twitch Plays Pokemon' chat, it'll make the character in the streamed version Pokemon Red do something. What many of them don't know is that, in doing so, they're also controlling a game of Tetris elsewhere.Read more...

Scaffold Now provides a unique spin on the classic puzzle game Tetris by turning it into a platformer. Finally, a version of Tetris where the line piece isn't the most valuable and coveted thing.

Scaffold Now is a simple Flash game in which you must drop blocks to the ground to help your little mushroom-looking character climb higher. The board scrolls up, so you'll need to climb in order to keep from being swallowed up by the bottom of the screen. If that happens, it's game over and your character goes to the same hellacious purgatory all cleared lines must go.

You can play Scaffold Now by heading over to the game's website, though we'd be remiss if we didn't point out it can be a little janky at times. Scaffold Now's controls aren't the most precise and the game periodically locked up during our trials, though these hiccups did little to discourage our attempts to reach the peak of Mount Tetris.

Come for the killer Tetris tune, stay for the hypnotic Tetris gameplay. As much as I liked the latest from Smooth McGroove, I was oddly transfixed by the gameplay video that goes along with it. Tetris, man.Read more...

Here's a challenge: listen through this fantastic rendition of the original Tetris theme by Smooth McGroove, and see if you don't end up with the song stuck in your head.Read more...

Are you ready to see something incredible? I'm not sure you're ready. Get ready. Are you ready now? Okay. Check this business out.Read more...

Provided some tips—like those from tetrisconcept—you can keep a game of Tetris going forever. All you need is a Tetris game that randomly generates piece sequences, a hold feature, and at least 3 piece previews. Not all Tetris games work like that, though 'good' ones are supposed to (apparently). You might need to check if your Tetris fulfills those requirements. But if that's the type of game you have, you should check out this lengthy read about how to think about and game Tetris. Here is a small snippet, which includes diagrams. Mind, the letters correspond to the piece that most looks like that letter. As in, "T" is, well, the T shape. Z is the piece that closest looks like a Z, and so on. If done right, your play should look like this GIF: Actually, for those of you that are more visually oriented, the GIF might explain patterns more rapidly, and without jargon to boot. But if you'd like to read up on methods, again, check the full article out. Playing forever [tetrisconcept, via Boing Boing]

#music Video game soundtracks have been around for more than three decades, if you count back to the doomp-doomp of Space Invaders. This mash-up video created by Ithaca Audio folds in bits of audio from Tetris, Street Fighter and Sonic next to tracks by David Bowie, Michael Jackson and the old-school Doctor Who theme. And to keep everything tied together thematically, samples are dropped with input from re-wired Nintendo system controllers. A catchy bit of fusion, if you ask me. More »

Tetris is timeless, but EA has still found a way to update the classic game for the 21st century: microtransactions. Tetris Blitz for iOS and Android is built around a two-minute Tetris round, in which players attempt to earn as many points as possible.

To help earn those points, you'll be able to buy power-ups, with new ones released weekly. New "Drag and Place" controls add another control option to the existing swipe-based scheme. And to further highlight that this is a 2013 game, players will also be able to compete on Facebook. It'll be released this spring on iOS, Google Play, and the Amazon Appstore.

#tetris Coming this spring to Android and iOS, Tetris Blitz takes the lightning round concept of Bejeweled Blitz and applies it to the world's most beloved poozle (Russian for puzzle, probably) game. This does not mean you won't spend an hour playing Tetris in the bathroom at work — you'll just get a lot more games in one sitting. More »

#retropreview A brief exchange on Twitter yesterday got me wondering how the media covered Tetris back in the day before that game's release. More »

#tetris To be honest, this Tetris mug would probably drive me crazy. I would fill it with my morning coffee and then wait for that one long piece to fall. And I'd be waiting forever, because it never, ever will. More »

#tetris Congratulations are in order for Kotaku reader Caleb, who wrote a crossword puzzle that the New York Times will be publishing next Thursday, October 25. More »

#tetris Tetris-inspired furniture may not be new, but in this case, it's never looked better. More »

#art Artist Keith P Rein is noted for his colorful and erotically charged illustrations. What do you expect when the P in Keith P Rein stands for penis. More »

#tetris There are few things more heart-breaking in this world than a cloned video game. A game that takes something someone else has done and, with little effort, shamelessly copies it in the hopes of riding some coattails to a cash register. More »

Hey, if a game as old-school as Battleship can get its own feature film, why not Tetris? More »

#tetris Sometimes the headline says it all, doesn't it? On Britain's got Talent, contestent Greig Stewart, a 27 year-old software developer came on to do a musical performance. More »

#tetris Obviously with a ton of Tetris-inspired prints lying around the warehouse, fashion label Black Milk have added a Tetris swimsuit to its existing line of Tetris leggings. More »

#mit More »

#science Parents worldwide may keep chiding their children for sitting too close to the TV while playing video games, claiming it'll ruin their vision. But researchers in the UK have figured out a way that bringing the screen closer to the kids can actually treat a common eye condition. More »

#watchthis Either these five people look amazingly similar, or there's some brilliant digital trickery going on. Either way, this clip is bound to remind you of a video game you used to play. More »

This is amazing! Well, the game itself – a hobbled, ASCII-esque version of Tetris with only two block types – isn’t amazing, but the fact that it comprises just 140 bytes is. 140 bytes in this instance also means 140 characters, so essentially this is a working game you could post on Twitter.(more…)